Cynicism is the Enemy of the Way We Should Be Doing Journalism

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

The essence of great journalism is skepticism, questioning what seems to be happening in the world, especially as it is being presented by those with power—or those with whom we are usually inclined to agree. But skepticism can curdle into cynicism, and when that happens, we often fall short in journalism, missing some of the most important stories out of world weariness, dismissing outrages as commonplace, substituting the perspective of the jaded insider for what should be our preferred posture as curious outsiders.

Last week, a couple of quite disparate incidents felt to me like unfortunate momentary victories for cynicism, and in this column I hope to push back a bit, doing my bit to recall us to a better version of our mission.

The “most racist thing”

Let’s begin with Trump’s post of a video including a scene of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. It was over the line for Senator Tim Scott, who volunteered that it was the “most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Note: not the only such thing, just the “most.” Perhaps because Scott is the only Black Republican to have sat in the Senate in this century (after only one in the last century, following two in the Nineteenth Century), and more likely because he chairs the GOP senatorial campaign committee, that prompted Trump to take down the video 12 hours after it was posted.

But what drew my attention was coverage of the incident by the White House press corps. First, they dutifully passed along a comment from the press secretary calling the early response to the video—before Scott had weighed in—“fake outrage.” After Scott spoke up, however, reporters let various White House staffers hide behind anonymity, to criticize an unnamed staffer—apparently aide Natalie Harp—for having allowed the offending post to go up.

In this supposed version of events, the President of the United States, who frequently spends his evening posting on his own social network from his bedroom in the White House, actually is depending on a 33 year-old aide, sometimes referred to by colleagues as the “human printer” because of her role printing things out for her laptopless boss to read, to act as his editor, in this case at 11:45pm.

Is there any reported case of her acting as an editor, substantively reviewing a post and persuading Trump to modify or forego it? Not that I could find. Did staff indicate she played, or might have played, such a role when Trump recently posted 158 times during three overnight hours, or when he defamed the late Rob Reiner? When he almost blew up NATO over threats to seize Greenland by force or in besmirching the memory of allied troops who gave their lives in Afghanistan? No, no, no and no. Everyone seems to acknowledge that Trump did those things all by himself.

 

So why grant anonymity to those trying to pin this latest bit of racism on someone else? The New York Times’s own guidelines provide that anonymity “should be used only for information that we believe is newsworthy and credible, and that we are not able to report any other way.” Clearly, this case didn’t pass that test. A Times spokesperson told me, “We constantly examine the reliability and motives of people who provide information to us anonymously and we use that information as sparingly as possible.”

But it gets worse. Trump admitted, before the day was out, that it had been his idea to post the racist video. Trump said he hadn’t watched it through, which would have taken less than two minutes, before directing that it be posted. No one outside the White House seems to have any idea whether or not this is true. Even later knowing about the shot of the Obamas, Trump refused to apologize. There is no indication Ms. Harp or anyone else has been punished, or even privately admonished.

We shouldn’t help people lie anonymously

What is clear, however, is that not only had the exculpatory staff sources been granted anonymity improperly, they had lied when given the privilege in order to deflect responsibility from Trump. CBS News, which seems to increasingly lose the plot with each passing day, and CNN even allowed sources to induce them to publish that Trump later blamed an unnamed staffer in private calls with Sen. Scott and a preacher from Scott’s home state, thereby enlisting in Trump’s deflection.

News organizations with whom I was able to talk about this seemed unapologetic. One editor pooh-poohed the idea that people who lie when granted anonymity shouldn’t be granted it again. I can’t imagine the principled case for that position.

Here’s the real problem: This behavior by White House reporters and their editors reflects a far-too-common view of all of this as a game, in this case what an editor called “blame game stuff.” But one president spewing racism about another isn’t a game. It’s a cancer on our society, metastasizing from the top down. And viewing it as a game, focusing on an “insider” view of the making of a gaffe rather than the societal effect, is deeply cynical, and highly corrosive of how journalism is supposed to work.

Dissembling at the Post

Just so you don’t get the sense that the problem is confined to a zone around Trump, the other moment of cynicism that irked me last week came from the Washington Post, and was directed at its own staff.

In laying off perhaps 350 people, launching the Post into the beginning of a death spiral and retreating from huge swaths of coverage, the feckless publisher, Will Lewis, couldn’t bother to show up or say anything; he may have already been fired (that was announced a few days later), but appeared to be busy packing for a trip to the Super Bowl even as his sports department was dismissed en masse. Owner Jeff Bezos was once again playing with his rockets, on which he has spent more than $8 billion, a significant multiple of his commitment to the Post.

That left editor Matt Murray, a former colleague of mine from the Wall Street Journal, whom I like personally, and who has led the Post to some strong coverage, especially in the last year. But rather than insist on being allowed either to be candid with his own staff or to resign, Murray, too, took what felt to me like a sadly cynical course.

His note to employees, which the paper’s PR staff later made public, said the bloodletting would “better position” the Post, would help the paper “better navigate” competition and technological change and will “secure our future in service of our journalistic mission and provide us stability moving forward.” None of that is true. While cutting, the note promised growth ahead; with the owner refusing additional investment and the publisher AWOL, it bragged of “institutional backing.”

Matt Murray is likely a better choice to edit the Post than anyone else who would be selected by Bezos. But the judgment reflected in his note is that it was a time for dissembling rather than transparency, reflected an inability to call bad news simply that, and a calculation that, in their moment of pain, he should approach his colleagues cynically, hoping they would understand the game with his bosses he is presumably trying to play. That can only have eroded their confidence—and, even more important, that of the readers with whom his words were shared. That is not how we should be practicing journalism in 2026.

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